What, if any, similarities and differences between song and speech are consistent across cultures? Both song and speech are found in all known human societies and are argued to share evolutionary roots and cognitive resources, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song and speech across languages on a global scale. We will compare sets of matched song/speech recordings produced by our 81 coauthors whose 1st/heritage languages span 23 language families. Each recording set consists of singing, recited lyrics, and spoken description, plus an optional instrumental version of the sung melody to allow us to capture a “musi-linguistic continuum” from instrumental music to naturalistic speech. Our literature review and pilot analysis using five audio recording sets (by speakers of Japanese, English, Farsi, Yoruba, and Marathi) led us to make six predictions for confirmatory analysis comparing song vs. spoken descriptions: three consistent differences and three consistent similarities. For differences, we predict that: 1) songs will have higher pitch than speech, 2) songs will be slower than speech, and 3) songs will have more stable pitch than speech. For similarities, we predict that 4) pitch interval size, 5) timbral brightness, and 6) pitch declination will be similar for song and speech. Because our opportunistic language sample (approximately half are Indo-European languages) and unusual design involving coauthors as participants (approximately 1/5 of coauthors had some awareness of our hypotheses when we recorded our singing/speaking) could affect our results, we will include robustness analyses to ensure our conclusions are robust to these biases, should they exist. Other features (e.g., rhythmic isochronicity, loudness) and comparisons involving instrumental melodies and recited lyrics will be investigated through post-hoc exploratory analyses. Our sample size of n=80 people providing sung/spoken recordings already exceeds the required number of recordings (i.e. 60) to achieve 95% power with the alpha level of 0.05 for the hypothesis testing of the selected six features. Our study will provide diverse cross-linguistic empirical evidence regarding the existence of cross-cultural regularities in song and speech, shed light on factors shaping humanity’s two universal vocal communication forms, and provide rich cross-cultural data to generate new hypotheses and inform future analyses of other factors (e.g., functional context, sex, age, musical/linguistic experience) that may shape global musical and linguistic diversity.

Cross-cultural musical analysis requires standardized symbolic representation of sounds such as score notation. However, transcription into notation is usually conducted manually by ear, which is time-consuming and subjective. Our aim is to evaluate the reliability of existing methods for transcribing songs from diverse societies. We had 3 experts independently transcribe a sample of 32 excerpts of traditional monophonic songs from around the world (half a cappella, half with instrumental accompaniment). 16 songs also had pre-existing transcriptions created by 3 different experts. We compared these human transcriptions against one another and against 10 automatic music transcription algorithms. We found that human transcriptions can be sufficiently reliable (~90% agreement, κ ~.7), but current automated methods are not (<60% agreement, κ <.4). No automated method clearly outperformed others, in contrast to our predictions. These results suggest that improving automated methods for cross-cultural music transcription is critical for diversifying MIR.

Music and language are both forms of communication ubiquitously observed across human societies, prompting researchers to investigate why and how they evolved. While such research initially focused on the biological evolution of the capacities to create and perceive language and music, researchers increasingly emphasize the cultural evolution of language and music to study the mechanisms and processes driving the diversity and regularities of music and language. In this chapter, we aim to provide not only an overview and seminal studies of the cultural evolution of language and music (e.g. phylogenetic analysis of basic vocabulary, sequence alignment of melodies, rhythm transmission chain experiments) but also to contrast and synthesize both fields to highlight promising areas of future research. We group the literature by empirical/field studies, laboratory studies, simulation studies, and co-evolution. Furthermore, we propose key ideas that each discipline can learn from the other and promising research topics to encourage collaborative work between these two. We argue that integrating the emerging field of cultural evolution of music with the larger literature on language evolution will enrich our understanding of both music and language.

The universality and diversity of music in human societies make it an important research model for understanding how cultural features change over time and space. In this chapter, we review research on the cultural evolution of music, broken down into three major approaches: 1) corpus-based approaches that use large datasets to infer evolutionary patterns, 2) experimental approaches that explore cultural transmission and transformation, and 3) research on “music-like” behaviors in non-human species, such as bird and whale song, that highlights shared mechanisms and future directions. Finally, we discuss applications of this research to issues like copyright enforcement and algorithmic inequality. Given the diversity of musical datasets that have yet to be fully leveraged, we think that music has the potential to become a powerful research model for cultural evolution.

Which information dominates in evaluating performance in music? Both experts and laypeople consistently report believing that sound should be the most important domain when judging music competitions, but experimental studies of Western participants rating video-only vs. audio-only versions of 6-second excerpts of Western classical performances have shown that in at least some cases visual information can play a stronger role. However, whether this phenomenon applies generally to music competitions or is restricted to specific repertoires or contexts is disputed. In this Registered Report, we focus on testing the generalizability of sight vs. sound effects by replicating previous studies of classical piano competitions with Japanese participants, while also expanding the same paradigm using new examples from competitions of a traditional Japanese folk musical instrument: the Tsugaru shamisen. For both classical piano and Tsugaru shamisen, we ask participants to choose the winner between the 1st- and 2nd- placing performers in 5 competitions and the 1st-place and low-ranking performers in 5 competitions (i.e., 40 performers total from 10 piano and 10 shamisen competitions). We tested the following three predictions twice each (once for piano and once for shamisen): 1) an interaction was predicted between domain (video-only vs. audio-only) and variance in quality (choosing between 1st and 2nd place vs. choosing between 1st and low-placing performers); 2) visuals were predicted to trump sound when variation in quality is low (1st vs. 2nd place); and 3) sound was predicted to trump visuals when variation in quality is high (1st vs. low-placing). Our experiments (n = 155 participants) confirmed our first predicted interaction between audio/visual domain and relative performer quality for both piano and shamisen conditions, suggesting that this interaction is cross-culturally general. In contrast, the second prediction was only supported for the piano stimuli and the third prediction was only supported for the shamisen condition, suggesting culturally dependent factors in the specific balance between sight and sound in the judgment of musical performance. Our results resolve discrepancies and debates from previous sight-vs-sound studies by replicating and extending them to include non-Western participants and musical traditions. Our findings may also have practical applications to evaluation criteria for performers, judges, and organizers of competitions, concerts, and auditions.